Friday, April 29, 2016

40
Guns to Apache Pass was the last Western Audie
Murphy, now 43, made for Columbia, and in fact the last movie he starred in tout court. He did have a cameo role (as
Jesse James) in A
Time for Dying in 1969 but to all intents and purposes, 40 Guns to Apache Pass was his last
outing in the saddle. He died in 1971.

It was not a glorious filmic farewell,
being an average Western at best. It was also the last Western movie to be
directed by William Witney (though he went on with TV Westerns till ’82).
Witney was a Mascot/Republic alumnus, experienced in B-Westerns - he’d done
many Roy Rogers oaters. He’d also directed Audie before, in Arizona
Raiders in 1965, also for Columbia. He was not one of the greats, I
fear, though reliable and pretty competent.

By the late 60s we had a right to expect
slightly more nuanced films about Apaches. But the Apaches in this picture are
out-and-out baddies, referred to as savages and no one contradicts that. Their
leader is Cochise
and Cochise had of course, since 1950 anyway, been portrayed as a statesmanlike
and wise leader – one thinks in particular of Jeff Chandler in Broken
Arrow, but other Cochises too were serious figures. Here, though,
Cochise (Michael Keep) is just a fierce chief who has taken a vow to
exterminate all palefaces from his lands, and his Apaches are just nameless and
faceless extras to be shot down at will, as they were in countless bad Westerns
of the 1930s and 40s.

We are in Arizona in the late 1860s.
Cochise and his braves are on the warpath and the US Army is undermanned and
ill-armed (though of course far better armed than the Apaches). Captain Coburn
(Murphy) is a brave but strict officer charged by a beleaguered colonel (Byron
Morrow) at Apache Wells with bringing in a vital cargo of forty repeating
rifles (Henrys, I think) so that the soldiers can protect themselves and the
settlers they have gathered there.

Among these settlers are the children of
good old Kenneth MacDonald, farmer: they are Ellen (Laraine Stephens, in her
only Western movie), the inamorata of the captain, and her two brothers, just
young boys, who join up to wear the blue when their daddy is killed by the
Indians. They want revenge. The older lad, Mike (Michael Blodgett, actually 27
but looking younger) is OK as a soldier, full of gung-ho in fact, but his younger
sibling, Doug (former child actor Michael Burns, who was 19 but looks about 15)
is a tender flower, afraid of the sight of blood and, to be frank, a bit of a
coward. The expedition doesn’t go well. Doug freezes up when Mike is beset by
Apaches, and his brother is horribly killed. The captain brands Doug a “yellow
boy”. To make matters worse, the rest of the troop are pretty bad eggs.

They are led by ex-Confederate Corporal
Bodine, played by orange-haired Kenneth Tobey, always rather good as a baddy.
In Westerns, -ine or –een names tend to be skunks. Bodine
hates Capt. Coburn and will do anything to get him killed. He whips up the
other troopers, including poor Doug, into mutiny, nabs the forty rifles and
plans to sell them to Cochise. Now you know that in Westerns, selling guns to
the Indians comes somewhere between cannibalism and matricide on the scale of
heinous crimes.

This whole rather old-fashioned skullduggery
plot was penned by the Willinghams, Willard and Mary, pals of Audie who wrote
his Whispering Smith TV show as well
as various other Murphy oaters on the big screen. Willard also appears in the farrago
as an actor, one of the mutinous troopers, Fuller (he was also Frank James in A Time for Dying).

The best actor in the cast is probably Robert
Brubaker as the crusty veteran Sergeant Walker. He makes the most of the part
and there’s a good bit with him in a rocking chair. Brubaker was Floyd the
bartender in Gunsmoke and Deputy
Blake in US Marshal on TV but he’d
also done a few big-screen Westerns, including another, similar Murphy/Witney
Western, Apache Rifles in 1964.

40
Guns to Apache Pass also features a rather tiresome
voiceover narration that adds nothing and which could well have been dispensed
with. The music (Richard LaSalle) is unWestern and uninspired. The titles are
very 60s. There are California locations and the camerawork was done by Jacques
Marquette, who had started in Hollywood back in 1919 as a gofer and then
technician, graduating to cinematographer. He did mostly TV work but he’d shot Arizona Raiders with Audie in 1965.

40
Guns to Apache Pass (the story has nothing to do
with the 1862 battle with Cochise at Apache Pass) is not a bad Western. It isn’t
lousy or anything. But it’s routine and Audie had certainly done better.

Monday, April 25, 2016

In
the 1980s and 90s I lived in Italy and there I became an admirer or the work of
Roman singer-songwriter Francesco De Gregori. I had several of his albums but
my favorite (unsurprisingly, given my love for all things Western) was the 1976
record, Bufalo Bill
(the buffalo only has one L in Italian).

The title track is glorious: melodic, triste, hopeful,
and altogether beautiful.

I
thought you might like to hear it. I know some of my readers might struggle a
little with the Italian text so I have translated it for you, and you’ll find
it below with the original words below that.

Buffalo Bill did of course tour Italy, and I
remember going to the site in Florence where he pitched his tents and put on
his show. Perhaps that was the start of the love affair the country has had
with the Western.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

I must admit to quite liking Sterling
Hayden B-Westerns. He was good at gritty films
noirs and those were transferable skills for tough-guy Western roles. Have
a look at Flaming
Feather (1952), for example, or Shotgun
(1955). Best of all, Denver
& Rio Grande (1952). Hayden himself didn’t like them though. He
called them “wretched” and only did them as a job, to pay for his sailing and
alimony (he was a serial divorcee).

Sterling Tough-Guy Hayden

Like Valerie, another Hayden picture of 1957, The Iron Sheriff is more of a
courtroom drama than a proper Western (though Hayden as sheriff is not at the trial
but out tracking down the murderer, so that’s good) but that’s one of the
reasons I like it. Not that I am a great Perry Mason fan or anything but you
see in this trial you have the ideal personnel: the prosecutor is stern Frank
Ferguson, the judge is a sterner Will Wright and the defense attorney is alcoholic,
cynical, laid-back John Dehner (in an excellent performance). Three of my
favorite Western character actors, in a legal triangular duel of words. Can’t
be bad. Talking of Perry Mason, writer Seeleg Lester, whose only Western movie
this was, penned several Perry Mason
episodes on TV, and it shows. I wonder why his momma named him Seeleg? But that's by-the-by.

In the poster Hayden looks more like Robert Ryan

We are in South Dakota, 1891, and in the
opening scenes a buckskinned stagecoach driver is shot and killed (it's a good stunt fall). The sheriff’s
son Benjie (former child actor and later regular of TV Westerns, Darryl Hickman)
is blamed and locked up. The newspaper owner (Kent Taylor in extraordinarily
1950s hairdo) seems to have it in for the boy and whips up the town against him
(and his dad). Mr. Taylor, you doubtless know, was a B-Western vet from a Henry Hathaway/Randolph Scott picture of 1933 until a 1967 episode of Rango on TV. Quite a career.

Judge Will Wright skeptical of the arguments of Prosecutor Frank Ferguson

So the movie is really a whodunnit, and
we ride up false trails and down garden paths as we are led to believe the guilty party was
first one town resident, then another.

Directed by lifer Sidney Salkow (writer
on Bing’s 1936 singing Western Rhythm on
the Range and director of B-Westerns right through to The
Great Sioux Massacre in 1965), The
Iron Sheriff is solid, OK, but honestly not much more. It’s Hayden that
makes it, even if he was sleepwalking through the part. He’s Iron by the way because he does the
right thing with steely resolve and gives testimony that incriminates his own
son because he believes it to be true.

There’s lerve in the SD air, for both
brylcreemed Kent and the sheriff love Constance Ford, and that’s why Kent hates
the sheriff and wants him out. However, Constance naturally opts for Sterling
(whose hair oil has been kept modestly in check). And Benjie the son also has
an inamorata, Kathleen (Kathi Walden), who testifies that she is still at
school though she was 24 and looks it. Perhaps she was a late developer.

The sheriff's son is in jail for murder. Lawyer Dehner has to get him off.

There’s a range detective (Mort Mills),
rather a tough nut, and a US marshal (Walter Sande) also turns up in town, sent
by the governor, to baby-sit the sheriff in case he tries to get his son off. So
the character actors are there alright.

Finally Sheriff Sterling IDs the
killer and sets off in hot pursuit. But will he bring him in alive or does he
have revenge-murder on his mind? The tension isn’t that great, though, in fact,
and we kinda know the answer in advance.

John Dehner, fine actor

Indeed, the whole thing lacks tension,
and even credibility, and there’s a bit which is prudishly puritan, even for
1957, when the whole courtroom is shocked by the suggestion (hinted at,
obviously, not voiced, dear me, no) that the sheriff’s son and his gal might
actually have had “unnatural relations” – they mean sex, aka natural relations - before they married. The
music (Emil Newman) is grim too, seeming to be the soundtrack of a cheap
gangster flick. So I fear that The Iron
Sheriff is not exactly from the very top drawer of Western movies – far from
it. Still, Sterling’s in it and with Will, Frank and John in the courtroom, it’s
worth a watch.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Well, almost apotheosis. If he hasn’t
become a god, he’s been pretty well sanctified or beatified since his death.
The Jesse James of popular understanding is a good man: or at the very least a
bad man with many saving graces. On the screen he has been a hero. It’s in many
ways curious that a sociopath, a young guerrilla fighter from a slave-owning
family who participated in atrocities and what today would be called war
crimes, a man who after the war turned to robbery and murder, a vain and
violent fellow, a plain bad egg in other words, should become the gallant
knight of myth and popular legend.

Jesse Woodson James (1847 - 1882)

As with the likes of Buffalo Bill and
Wild Bill Hickok, the process started while he was still pursuing his chosen
profession – in Jesse James’s case stealing from and killing innocent people. The
James Gang made the leap from local to national fame when they switched from
robbing local banks to holding up trains in 1873 to ‘74. Suddenly they were famous
in an altogether different way. A story was published as early as 1874 in the
New York World describing a gunfight
between the James gang and Pinkerton detectives.

In 1877 passionate James partisan JN
Edwards published Noted Guerrillas in
which he argued that Jesse and his comrades were a knightly warrior class
carrying on the Great Cause by other means (he did not call these means thieving
and killing). The James boys were ‘natural aristocrats’ and heroic fighters. Edwards
placed James and his accomplices within the Southern tradition of ‘honor’, with
the right to defend themselves, their homes and their beliefs with deadly force. James
wasn’t just a common criminal: he was the inheritor of the whole Southern tradition.

James partisan JN Edwards

In the wake of the Glendale robbery
(1879) there appeared The Life and
Adventures of Frank and Jesse James and the Younger Brothers by Joseph A
Dacus and this was frequently later revised and updated to include the later
criminal career of Jesse, including his assassination. Dacus was a believer in
the negative effects on the economy and on society of the great railroad
companies, and his Jesse became a hero of the little man battling against
corporate greed.

The James Gang hold up a train

In actual fact, Jesse James didn’t
target the railroads at all: he assaulted the express companies. It was a key
difference. Express companies oppressed no one, and Missouri farmers had little
if anything to do with them. The railroad companies generally ignored the
bandits, only really acting from 1881 at the urging of Governor Crittenden. It
was the express companies that paid the Pinkertons and the state governors who obsessed
about ‘law and order’ for political reasons.

There was huge coverage of the James
Gang’s depredations in the press but hardly any mention at all of their
targeting railroads or other ‘big business’. The bandits were also perfectly
capable of robbing stage travelers, passengers on trains and small banks. The idea
of Jesse James as the cavalier fighting corporate America was a later
construct.

Right after James’s assassination in
1882 a key book appeared: Frank Triplett’s Life,
Times and Treacherous Death of Jesse James. Triplett’s Jesse was a paragon
of his white race, trained in Quantrill’s school of “rough riders” (barbarous
guerrillas have become brave and skilled horsemen) and “Anglo-Norman Comanches”
(Jesse was no common Anglo-Saxon; he was of nobler stock). Jesse treats all
women chivalrously and at one point avenges the rape of a girl by Indians.

The ballad

The
Ballad of Jesse James also gained currency
extraordinarily fast after the outlaw’s death, story-songs being so popular and
such an effective way of making a legend ‘go viral’, as we would say today. The author of the song is not known for
certain but is often thought to be a certain Billy Gashade, and some versions
include a statement to that effect in one of the verses. In the song, Jesse was a Robin Hood:

He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,

He'd a hand and a heart and a brain.

Of course there is no evidence
whatsoever that he had such altruistic motives. We are told that “that dirty
little coward” Robert Ford “laid poor Jesse in his grave”. And indeed, the
manner of James’s demise earned him a lot of sympathy from those prepared to
overlook his past. TJ Stiles, in his fine biography of Jesse James, quotes the
diary of a Kansas City rabbi who called the killing of James “a stroke into the
face of morality and civilization.”

The best book on Jesse James

And of course there came the dime
novels. Between 1881 (i.e. before Jesse’s death) and 1883 Frank Tousey
published a whole series of (wholly fictional) stories which followed the Deadwood Dick formula. The James Gang
are chivalrous heroes victimized by the law. Rapidly, Jesse James became the
leading hero of the dime novel genre, even more so than Deadwood Dick, in a way
that no other outlaw ever did.

Dime novel Jesse

Earlier Western figures of legend had
their origins in Cooper’s hero Hawkeye: they were brave Indian fighters, often
rescuing maidens from captivity. But from the Reconstruction period on, pulp
literary heroes were more often bold individuals battling for the rights of the
individual against corrupt law and greedy corporations. Jesse James’s story
could be easily adapted to that agenda. Again and again he was the brave
fighter in combat against the wicked and grasping railroad companies. The dime
novel industry was booming at the time and the ‘literary’ works were not only
read by the poor. All classes perused them eagerly – except of course the
illiterate, which included African-Americans deliberately deprived of
education.

And the Jesse James of myth was taken up by the motion picture industry. There have been over a hundred
portrayals of the Missouri outlaw on the big and small screen from 1921 onwards
(many reviewed on this blog) and what used to be called Hollywood is still
producing them (another is planned for 2017). None show the ‘true’ Jesse James;
all show to a greater or lesser degree the mythic one. The pattern was set by
the very first, silent movie: it was made by and starred Jesse James’s own son,
and viewing it you would say that Jesse was a much-maligned, very good man, a
true hero. Little has fundamentally changed since in screen Jesses. Only Brad Pitt’s in 2007 really gave us a glimpse of what the real Jesse may have been
like.

Jesse James Jr. was the first to play him on screen

In the 1950s the Jesse James ‘story’ got
a new boost from an unlikely source: the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm,
who wrote in Bandits (1959) about
what he called the ‘social bandit’, and specifically used Jesse as an example. Social
bandits, said Hobsbawm, are “peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as
criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their
people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even
leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and
supported.” James was a good example of the social bandit because he was the
victim of injustice; he righted wrongs; he stole from the rich and gave to the
poor; he killed only for just revenge or in self-defense. (It seems that
Hobsbawm had swallowed the pulp/Hollywood idea of Jesse James rather than the
real one.)

Eric Hobsbawm

The thesis gained international currency
and soon all sorts of Wild West figures were being identified as social bandits,
but none more so than Jesse James. More recently the idea has received
criticism. The Western historian Richard White, for example, pointed out that
as there were no peasants in nineteenth century Missouri the theory was a
little flawed.

Jesse James was in many ways not a ‘Western’
outlaw at all, but a Southern one. The James Gang were Confederate heroes, even
more so after the war was over. Of course many ex-Confederates frowned on the
criminal activities of the James Gang, but almost all the gang's supporters (and
there were many, from all classes) were former rebels. As the Kansas City Journal of Commerce noted, “These
outlaws have been harbored and befriended … by men who harbored and befriended
them during the war, and by nobody else, and for no other reason.” James and
his cohorts thrived in a context of deep-seated white-supremacist racism, anger
at Reconstruction, and nostalgia for the ante-bellum way of life. Jesse James
did not stand up for the Missouri farmer against the big corporations: he stood
for certain Missouri farmers against those with Union sympathies. JN Edwards
wrote in his eulogy for Jesse James, “Would to God he were alive today to make
a righteous butchery of a few more of them.” James fans expressed their support
after his assassination by chanting “Hurrah for Jeff Davis.”

The real Jesse James: he was always a Confederate at heart

When Jesse James was killed he was
already an anachronism. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the re-emergence
of the Democrats, as the Civil War receded into the past, he was less and less
relevant, and was branded, by both sides, as just a common robber. The James Gang
had anyway been pretty well destroyed as a serious force in 1876 and James’s
late 1870s activities were a pale imitation of what he had done in the war and
immediately after.

Jesse's mother was a formidable woman and a huge influence

Jesse James always had an eye for
publicity and was a shrewd manipulator of the press, especially in partnership
with JN Edwards (for he was a partner of Edwards, not his puppet). He probably
got it from his mother, who played the crowd with such skill at the inquest on and
funeral of her son. Despite his moderate education, Jesse James was articulate,
well-read on current events, and he much enjoyed what we would today call his
celebrity status. He did have saving
graces: he was a loving husband and father, and he had a sharp sense of humor.
But those graces didn’t save much. He was really an unpleasant thug. Yet he is
worshiped as a hero. And if he is worshiped, well then, perhaps apotheosis is
the right word after all.

Monday, April 18, 2016

Issued within weeks of The Lucky Texan, with much the same crew
and cast, and, to be frank, pretty well the same plot, The Lawless Frontier was another in that
fun series of sixteen one-hour oaters that John Wayne made in the eighteen
months or so between the end of 1933 and early 1935. These movies were produced
by Paul Malvern’s Lone Star company and released by Monogram Pictures, before
it got delusions of grandeur and became Allied Artists and aspired to color
A-movies. Poverty Row residents Lone Star and Monogram were a far cry from Fox’s
mega-budget Raoul Walsh-directed The Big Trail of 1930 that Wayne had starred in, but at least he was working. And
he was learning his craft, too.

It's got vim and zip

They were mostly directed by
B-Westernmeister RN Bradbury and although some were written by Duke’s drinking
buddy Lindsley Parsons, many, including The
Lucky Texan and The Lawless Frontier,
were penned by Robert Bradbury himself. He was pretty well on auto-pilot when
he did them; formulaic is hardly the word. But they are energetic and fun, and
still worth a watch today – at least to see them once.

Director Robert Bradbury (right) with his son Bob Steele

The
Lawless Frontier benefits from my hero Earl Dwire, who
from certain camera angles bears more than a passing resemblance to Adolf
Hitler, hamming it up wildly with a lousy ‘Mexican’ accent as bandit chief
Pandro Zanti (they all pronounce him Zanny). Complete with bandolero and
sombrero, Zanti despicably marauds the neighborhood, leers lasciviously at the
leading lady, and even shoots John Wayne’s dad in the back. We wouldn’t want
any anti-Mexican sentiment, though, so we are told (twice) that Zanti is only
posing as a Mexican (“he speaks the language fluently”); in reality he is a
white-Apache “half-breed”, so if he's half-Apache it’s perfectly to be expected that he would be a lowlife,
obviously.

Gabby rides with Earl Dwire, who is villain Pandro Zanti this time

Earl was usually the rather ineffectual
sheriff in town, who only takes the baddies into custody at the end once our
hero has bested them, but this time he had been promoted to principal villain
(it happened occasionally) and it’s Jack Rockwell (nearly always a lawman) who
wears the star as incompetent and crooked Sheriff Williams.

Zanti’s right-hand henchman is naturally
Yakima Canutt, as Joe again. Wayne’s pal Yak was of course in charge of the
stunts, doing many himself, but he often moonlighted as henchman too. It must
be said that as an actor, he made a good stuntman. But then none of the cast
was really going to pose a serious challenge to Laurence Olivier. Wayne himself was about the best: he was gradually
improving.

Buffalo Bill Jr. (Jay Wilsey) is a
second henchman (well, we’ve all got to start somewhere). He was in quite a few
of these Wayne Westerns.

Gabby Hayes is there, of course, billed
as George and with his beard at last properly in place. He is a failed miner whose
claim is plumb played out. Zanti lusts after his granddaughter Ruby (Sheila
Terry, who had co-starred with Wayne in an earlier Warners Western, Haunted Gold, and would also feature in
another Lone Star outing, ‘Neath Arizona Skies). Gabby always had a winsome granddaughter for Wayne to fall for.
Gabby is stabbed in the back in this one, oh no!, but luckily it’s only a flesh
wound and he is soon back to his old-timerish chuckling.

A fair maid to be wooed and won

John, by the way, is John again this
time, John Tobin. He was usually John Something. In The Lucky Texan he had broken the mold and been Jerry. I ask you.
But his flashy white horse Duke is nowhere to be seen in this picture. What has
become of him? John rides a black, though he assures us that it is a
thoroughbred.

Much is made in this movie of a secret
passage in the miner’s cabin and secret passages did feature quite heavily in
these pictures. Zanti’s gang number the right and proper seven. Zanti is finally done for when he drinks from a poisoned water hole, the fool, and serves him right too. Well, he was only an Apache half-breed.There are some
unpleasant stunts, including a brutal horse fall and one of a poor nag ridden
off a bluff and into a river. But there’s a good bit where John ties a string
to his pistol’s trigger in a canyon and manages both to shoot at the badmen and
chase their leader at the same time. Best of all, of course, there’s the sluice-run
stunt, also used in The Lucky Texan
(they weren’t going to waste a good idea) when John uses an old board to surf
down a chute at high speed and overtake the villain.

DP Archie Stout goes for an artistic shot

There are the usual horse chases and
fisticuffs, John employing that robust roundhouse punch he had. There’s
dynamite too. Oh yes, it’s all go.

Of course it finishes with wedded bliss
for John and Ruby, and John is now the new sheriff.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

I do admit to having a soft spot for the
sixteen Lone Star Westerns John Wayne did over eighteen months from late 1933
to early 1935. We’ve reviewed quite a few of them already. Yesterday I re-watched
one of my favorites of the series, The
Lucky Texan. It’s not a favorite because it’s in any way unusual or
original (perish the thought) but just because it’s brim-full of energy and
fun.

A whole lot of fun

We start with the good old Lone Star
logo to high-speed tiddly-dee music, the credits tell us that RN Bradbury
directed and wrote, and Archie Stout was behind the camera, so all’s well with
the world, and straight way there’s John meeting up with Gabby Hayes (beardless
in those days and billed as George). The pair immediately sit down and explain
the plot to each other. They needn’t have bothered because the plot is always
the same. John (actually he’s Jerry this time, so that’s new) has been away but
is back to live with Gabby on the ranch, as his daddy wanted. But rustlers have
taken all the cattle (there will certainly be a baddy in a suit in town who is
responsible, you wait) and so the two pals set up as blacksmiths (now that’s
new).

Gabby wasn't yet 50 but still did the old-timer parts

The good fortune of the titular Texan
shows itself when Jerry is being nice to a dog (a sure sign of goodiness) and
this dog, Friday, is in fact rather splendid. Later in the movie this mutt will
show himself to have positively Lassielike abilities, and save Gabby’s hide. Anyway,
in the first reel Friday digs up from the dust of the forge floor a gold nugget
that has dropped from the hoof of a horse Jerry had been shoeing. And they find
the seam it came from in a nearby creek. They are rich!

They decide not to stake the claim,
though, which you might think imprudent but you see they don’t want anyone else
to know where the bonanza has been found. So the story is all set up for
skullduggery. Surely there will be a pencil-mustached besuited villain in town,
Lloyd Whitlock most likely, probably with Yakima Canutt as henchman, who will
seek to do the dirty on the pals? Yup. There is. There always was. The evil
Harris (Whitlock) is the local assayer, very well placed to defraud prospectors
out of their claims. He also reveals to sidekick Yak that he was the one who
rustled all Gabby’s cattle on the ranch. He wants that ranch as well as the
gold, and sneakily gets Gabby to sign it over. What a skunk.

Just a minute, mister...

Wait! I hear you cry. Where is the girl?
Surely Gabby will have a winsome granddaughter who will come to live with her
grandad and fall for John? Yup. It’s Betty (Barbara Sheldon, who only did four
films and only one of them a Western) and she duly turns up in her 1930s dress
and is duly smitten. Well, John was jolly handsome, so you can’t wonder.

It ends in wedded bliss

There’ll be a sheriff, Earl Dwire most
probably, and he’ll be ineffectual until John and Gabby foil the plot. Then he’ll
take the badmen into custody. In this one Sheriff Earl has a ne’er-do-well gambling son,
Al, who shoots the bank manager (not a great crime, you may opine, shooting a
bank manager, but it is frowned upon in this town) and this son (Eddie Parker)
takes Gabby’s money and starts spreading it all over town, doh. So we get a
sub-plot of villainy, two for the price of one.

The usual suspects: Earl Dwire as sheriff, John Wayne as the hero, Yakima Canutt as henchman and Lloyd Whitlock as principal villain

Well, there are all the horse chases you
could want and several bouts of fisticuffs in which Wayne can use that splendid
roundhouse punch he had. There wasn’t much room for actual acting in these Lone
Star movies (luckily); they really depended on action. And we get plenty. In
this one the crooks, unmasked, try to get away on a motorized railroad buggy
and are pursued by Duke on Duke and Gabby in an automobile. There’s some high-class
stunt work (by Yak, of course, so Yak is chasing Yak) as the buggy and the car cross and nearly hit each other. There’s
also a good bit with Canutt and a recalcitrant mule (you can hear the crew
laughing). The best bit, though, is when Wayne rides a wooden pole at high
speed through a sluice run to overtake the fleeing Al. Not ones to pass up using
a good idea, they did it again in The Lawless Frontier the same year.

In the climactic trial scene Gabby
appears in drag (his old Charley’s Aunt
costume from his previous career on the boards) and much hilarity is the result.
He even shows a rather daring amount of leg.